Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Magnetic Robots!

I recently went to a conference all about STEM in the early childhood classroom and I came across this fabulous idea which I just had to try...

Magnetic Robots!!!

Magnets are such a fun and opened ended experience for children of all ages. Such an easy way to teach little ones cause and effect and develop fine motor skills as well. For this activity, the children were invited to build their own tin can robots.

With a glue gun I simply added magnets to bottle caps, legos, tangrams, unifix cubes, googly eyes, pom poms, and basically anything that I could find and let the children's creativity run wild.

The children really loved this activity and it brought up some great conversations about symmetry as well. We also discussed how many magnets we could fit onto a single robot and counted the number of eyes, antennae, etc.